We begin a series on the main presidential contenders for 2008 with the Republican front-runner

HE ENTERS the room like an affable tornado: pumping hands, patting backs and flirtatiously stealing a morsel from a giggling female fan's breakfast plate. Crowds love Rudy Giuliani, the mayor who led New York through the trauma of September 11th 2001. But in his quest for the presidency this pro-choice, pro-gay Republican must somehow convince his party's primary voters that he is conservative enough.

Perhaps that explains a slip he made before an audience of suits in Nashua, New Hampshire, last week. Mr Giuliani bragged that George Will, a conservative columnist, had called his stewardship of the Big Apple the “most conservative” government in America in the past 50 years. What Mr Will actually said was that Mr Giuliani had provided the most successful example of conservative governance in America in the 20th century. To most Americans, that is a much bigger compliment. But before Mr Giuliani can make his case to most Americans, he must win over the Republican base.

At this early stage, the polls say he is the front-runner: around ten points ahead of John McCain and at least 20 ahead of Mitt Romney among Republican voters. If he does win the Republican nomination, the polls show him breezing past Hillary Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, though they say he would only tie with Barack Obama, who is still well behind Mrs Clinton in the polls. Given the nation's snarlingly anti-Republican mood, these are extraordinary numbers. Voters say they would far rather elect a Democrat than a Republican, but when asked to compare named Democrats with Mr Giuliani, they mostly prefer the man who, after September 11th, was dubbed “America's mayor”.

A rising star

Chatting with random folks in New Hampshire, where the first primary will be held early next year, reveals why. Mr Giuliani has star power. Even the jobless drunks and the apathetic students have heard of him. The same is true of Mrs Clinton and Mr Obama, of course. But unlike Mr Obama, Mr Giuliani is famous for substantial achievements. And unlike Mrs Clinton, he is best known for things nearly all Americans applaud. He was unflappable as the World Trade Centre came crashing down beside him, and he slashed New York's awful crime rate. Tough on terrorism, tough on crime—the slogans practically write themselves.

Mr Giuliani's record in New York was indeed impressive. The city he took over in 1994 was considered ungovernable. This was not true: it had merely been atrociously governed for decades. Successive Democratic mayors had rewarded dysfunction, showering bureaucrats and welfare claimants with cash but requiring neither group to work (much or at all, respectively).

One in six New Yorkers drew welfare. Crime raged unchecked. Aggressive beggars and public urinators ruled the streets. As Fred Siegel observes in “The Prince of the City”, a biography of Mr Giuliani, New York's counter-cultural elite fought ingeniously to protect the rights of the anti-social. The New York Civil Liberties Union argued, for example, that peddlers of stolen goods could not be barred from setting up shop on the pavement, because if they sold books (among other stolen items) their free-speech rights would be infringed by moving them on.

By the early 1990s New Yorkers were in despair. Six out of ten told pollsters they wanted to move elsewhere. Some were even prepared to vote Republican. Mr Giuliani, a former anti-Mafia prosecutor with a reputation for rudeness and results, beat the ineffectual incumbent, David Dinkins, by a slim margin. Almost immediately, things started to change.

Mr Giuliani cracked down on the things that made the city unliveable, such as the “squeegee merchants” who wiped windscreens at stop lights and demanded money with veiled menaces. He appointed a police chief who refused to overlook small crimes and thereby curbed big ones, not least because so many of the people arrested for dodging subway fares turned out also to have guns, drugs or outstanding warrants. He bucked up police morale, which under Mr Dinkins had been so low that one policeman sued the city over the “health hazard” of being ordered to patrol a rough neighbourhood. Crime halved under Mr Giuliani and murders fell by two-thirds, transforming New York from one of the most dangerous cities in America to one of the safest.

He forced welfare claimants to clear up the city's filthy parks in exchange for their cheques. He also had them fingerprinted to curb fraud (a random check in neighbouring New Jersey had found that nearly a quarter of claimants there also claimed benefits illegally in New York). The welfare rolls shrank by 600,000.

Mr Giuliani broke a lot of things that needed breaking, such as the Mafia's control of New York's fish market and its rubbish-collection service. He sold off vacant public housing to private landlords who fixed it up and put tenants in it. He failed to turn around New York's lamentable schools, however, and his vows to trim the city's payroll and restore fiscal prudence proved hollow. He increased New York's debt by 50% and left his successor with a $4.5 billion deficit.

Overall, Mr Giuliani's great achievement was to apply common sense to a city that had abandoned it. Naturally, he made enemies. The many people he insulted detest him, as do most black New Yorkers. Although African-Americans were the main beneficiaries of the fall in crime, since they were the ones getting murdered, black leaders claimed that Mr Giuliani had made the streets safer only through racist brutality. “There was no crime in Nazi Germany,” said Mr Dinkins.

In fact, New York's police were less likely to shoot people under Mr Giuliani than they had been under Mr Dinkins, and only one-seventh as likely as in black-run Detroit or Washington, DC. But the news is about stories, not statistics. So when in February 1999 some inexperienced cops unloaded 41 bullets into a blameless African immigrant they thought was reaching for a gun, Mr Giuliani's enemies went on the offensive. Al Sharpton, a prominent black Democrat, declared that “If they can shoot anyone 41 times, they can shoot everyone 41 times.” Mr Giuliani's polls plunged. Had al-Qaeda not intervened, he would have left office unpopular.

Rude Rudy

As a presidential candidate, Mr Giuliani has two weak spots: his policies and his personality. His economic policies—low taxes, free trade and light regulation—differ little from those of the other leading Republicans. But his instincts on social issues are quite liberal. As mayor, he supported gun control, public funding for abortions for poor women and formal domestic partnerships for gays. Such views place him solidly in the American mainstream, but will repel those Republican primary voters who think that guns deter tyranny, abortion is murder and gays are somehow undermining heterosexual marriage.

The hero of the hourAP

So Mr Giuliani is trying hard to play down his social liberalism. On gun control, he says he “understands that what works in New York doesn't necessarily work in Mississippi or Montana.” On abortion, he says he supports “reasonable restrictions” such as a ban on partial-birth abortion, and that he “hates” abortion generally. And he indulges in hair-splitting on gays, arguing in favour of “domestic partnerships” but against “civil unions”.

Whether Republicans can stomach all this depends in part on how much they want to win. Nick Sosnowski, a pro-life student who met Mr Giuliani as he campaigned in a diner in New Hampshire, says his stance on abortion and his three marriages bother him, but “that's outweighed by his leadership. And we need a strong leader right now.”

Mr Giuliani's personality may be a bigger problem. He has a hideous temper and a tendency to bully. His personal life suggests a man who is, to put it bluntly, not very nice. He let his second wife know he was leaving her for his mistress via a news conference. His son no longer talks to him.

He is famously and foolishly intolerant of criticism: when New York magazine ran ads on the city buses claiming that it was “Possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for,” Mr Giuliani forced the buses to drop the ads, and was then embarrassingly beaten in court. And even Mr Giuliani's admirers admit he can sound callous. Of another young black man mistakenly shot by police, he said: “He's no altar boy.” It turned out he had been.

Most seriously, Mr Giuliani has at times shown woeful judgment. He sacked his best police chief, William Bratton, for attracting too much limelight. He hired another, a former prisons boss called Bernard Kerik, who turned out to be flamboyantly dodgy. While he was prisons boss he accepted a $165,000 gift, in the form of renovations to his apartment, from a construction firm with alleged mob ties seeking to do business with City Hall. He also failed to report a $28,000 loan from a property developer and held trysts with his mistress in an apartment set aside for the use of workers at Ground Zero.

This relationship was especially embarrassing for Mr Giuliani since, before the scandals erupted, he had persuaded George Bush to nominate Mr Kerik as homeland-security chief. That nomination was withdrawn after Mr Kerik admitted that he had failed to pay taxes for a nanny. Mr Giuliani later confessed that he had been briefed about other people's early doubts about Mr Kerik, but said he had then forgotten about them. As the campaign heats up, Mr Giuliani can expect frequent reminders of this lapse.

In the end, Americans must decide whether the man who saved New York can also govern America. The jobs are very different. The city was rotten; the nation is not. And Mr Giuliani may just be too metropolitan for middle Americans. The most popular footage of him on the internet shows him doing a comedy skit in a purple dress and blonde wig, during the course of which he slaps an amorous Donald Trump. To New Yorkers, this is no big deal. But it may raise eyebrows in Iowa.